They’re looking at you, people!

In an article that suggests you can judge a blogger by their commenters, we get a snap assessment of Pharyngula and you, the commenters:

Pharyngula writes smart stuff that looks down on religion; he gets smart and dismissive commenters.

I wouldn’t reject that characterization, but there has to be some appreciation of the diversity of people here. We do have some very dumb people who defend religion blindly, obviously, and some atheists who aren’t very smart, and some smart people who are religious. I can see where the proportions are skewed in predictable ways here, and we’ve got a different character than Crooked Timber or LGM, and we’re nothing like Freeperland, but I don’t particularly care for the thorough lumping of the description.

Obviously, though, I’m going to have to purify the comments section. If you don’t obediently parrot the Pharyngula party line, I’m afraid you’re going to have to go. Sorry. All non-smart and non-dismissive commenters will please immediately report to one of those other blogs, thank you very much.

In which the obnoxious atheist addresses his critics, and makes a polite suggestion to his fellow bloggers

This week, I tossed off a casual, flippant comment that launched a thousand ineffectual bastinados. I described a map that purported to show the frequency of religious adherents in the US this way:

It shows the concentration of ignorant, deluded, wicked, foolish, or oppressed victims of obsolete mythologies in the United States, with the lighter colors being the most enlightened and the dark reds being the most repressed and misinformed

Fury, outrage, and massive snits ensued. Blogs were riven to their very foundations by anger — “How dare Myers insult me…I am offended!” — and the sun was darkened in the sky, while badgers gave birth to raccoons and other abominations occurred with alarmingly elevated frequency. Mostly, though, people wrote more blog posts pro and con, commenters were roused to furious typing, fora were inundated with tirades, and my in-box was overflowing.

I was much amused — man, wait until I really cut loose — but basically thought the to-do was far too much noise about nothing. Please try to get used to it, O Pious Ones: atheists think your beliefs are wacky. Just as wacky as you find idols to monkey gods or cargo cults or Mormonism or Seventh Day Adventists or Bratz dolls. But now that the bonfire is cooling to a few scattered glowing embers, I thought I’d offer a few general responses to the most common complaints.

[Read more…]

Larry Moran refuses to be assimilated?

Curses — we almost had Sandwalk in our grasp. If only we’d sent the borg queen in a little earlier, we might have overcome his resistance.

Ah, well. There are other blogs to conquer, although I must say the swooning and shrieking and histrionics among the SciBlings as we absorbed yet another godless evilutionist into the hivemind would have been … entertaining. I shall not regard this as a setback, since Larry’s blog will still be promoting a nefarious world-view similar to my own. Bwahahaha!

A blogginghead in my future

If you’ve been following the Bloggingheads site, you probably already know that the best thing on it is Science Saturday with John Horgan and George Johnson. Horgan and Johnson are splitting up for the next few weeks, and are getting different heads to make a pair. Next week, George Johnson and the physicist Sean Carroll will be teaming up for a physics-heavy session, and the week after that, it’s John Horgan and me, of all people. I’m going to dig up my kids’ old boy scout manuals and review the sections on knots just in case he asks me about string theory.

Sean brings up a few things I’m mildly concerned about. I know from personal experience that being a blogger doesn’t necessarily translate well into more visual media; I’m not sure what to do about that, other than just being awake and avoiding faux pas like showing up at the camera naked. We also need juicy stuff to talk about. Like Sean, I’ll accept suggestions for what you want to hear in the comments—or you could be really wicked and write directly to Horgan with ideas for exciting topics to ambush me with (you could also advise Johnson on how to get a rise out of Carroll).

If you really want to have fun with it, mix up the questions. Carroll might be just as flummoxed getting asked about developmental networks in invertebrate genomes as I would be having to chatter about dark matter.

Microblogology

Hey, if you’ve been wondering what the sex symbols of science blogging look like, here’s your chance: a video of some bloggin’ microbiologists hanging out in Toronto.

Although, that title … it’s hard to imagine an uglier word than “blog,” but they managed to coin one.